Right, and it's a valid question to ask what methodology makes the best free map of the world; and, in particular, whether the community that (everyone agrees) is required to update the map grows best when presented with a 'fait accompli' imported map, or when it's able to evolve the map at its own pace.

You are welcome to draw your own conclusions on that score, but it's worth noting that the two best-mapped countries in OSM are probably Germany and the UK, neither of which has any significant imports.

No, Chris is right. We could have imported all of the OS vector data automatically and we chose not to. We could have imported all of NAPTaN automatically; we tried a few bits and chose not to.

The fact that OSM was a (partial) contributor to achieving the OS OpenData release (though the Guardian's Free Our Data campaign and the Cabinet Office's open data initiative were more significant) is hardly relevant. OS OpenData still did (and does) contain a lot of stuff that isn't in OSM and that we could have chosen to import had we wanted to.

Over the past year, I have seen imports done in: US, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Poland, Antarctica, HOT (Jordan), and Netherlands. Good or bad, that the current situation. When we are trying to figure out what this project is, any definition that does not match is current reality is probably not optimal.